The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. WineHQ is not responsible for what they say.

Profile not loading by nonplus on Monday March 19th 2018, 11:39

The game starts fine, but the problem for me is, that the profile won't load.
If i show my own profile its completely empty. It is not possible to start a game because the play-button is not visible.
Anyone having the same problem?

Despite the glowing recommendation of the most recent test, its still a stuttering mess for me with 3.0 rc5 and 2.21 staging. Could someone having a good experience post more about their setup and configure options.

Personally I get fair FPS on the counter, however the game is not running at that FPS. I have a 144hz monitor and I can safely say whatever the FPS readout says, the games not running more than maybe 40fps tops. Also on multiplayer the game frequently stalls for a good fraction of a second.

Migration from ArchWiki by Svitozar Cherepii on Saturday December 23rd 2017, 20:18

You can add useful information to HowTo/Notes and delete this comment:

[eu.battle.net/sc2/en/ StarCraft II] is a real-time strategy game from Blizzard Entertainment released in 2010. A native Linux version isn't available, but the game is fully playable using [[Wine]].

== Installation ==

==== Packages ====

You need to [[install]] {{Pkg|wine}}, {{Pkg|lib32-libjpeg-turbo}}, {{Pkg|lib32-libpng}}, {{Pkg|lib32-gnutls}} and {{Pkg|lib32-libldap}}. If you are using [[PulseAudio]], install {{Pkg|lib32-libpulse}} and {{Pkg|lib32-alsa-plugins}} available in [[multilib]]. Optionally, instead of regular {{Pkg|wine}}, you might prefer {{Pkg|wine-staging}} - [[Wine#CSMT_patch|enabling CSMT via the Staging tab in winecfg]] may greatly improve performance, but is not required. You'll also need to use {{Pkg|winetricks}} and install the following components (to use the Map Editor and avoid crashes on certain system configurations):

$ winetricks corefonts vcrun2005 vcrun2008 vcrun2015

==== Configuration ====

If you have a GPU which doesn't properly report the amount of memory available (older integrated or early AMD APUs), you'll need to tell Wine how much VRAM you have available. Open the Registry Editor:

$ regedit

Go to ''HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Wine/Direct3D'' (right-click on Wine and New -> Key, ''Direct3D'', Enter, if it doesn't exist) right-click on ''Direct3D'' (if such a key doesn't exist, right-click on ''Wine'', New -> Key, ''Direct3D'', OK), select New -> String Value, ''VideoMemorySize'', which you should set to the amount of VRAM your GPU has, in MB (for example, "1024" or "2048"). If you're using an integrated GPU, try to preallocate a fair amount of RAM for your GPU in BIOS/UEFI Setup and use the same value here (512 is good enough for low-medium settings).

* If the Battle.net App doesn't work, use a new Wine prefix.
* '''If you are asked to install Gecko, then click Install to do so.'''
* If the Battle.net App window is white, open ''winecfg'', go to ''Applications'' and set ''Windows Version'' to "Windows XP". You may do so for Battle.net.exe only, as SC2 itself works fine with this being set to anything newer.

==== Installing with the Blizzard App (former Battle.net App) ====

Recent SC2 versions require the [eu.battle.net/en/app/ Blizzard App] to be installed, as it replaced the launchers for all Blizzard games. Furthermore, recent patches massively changed the file structure in their newer games - if you have a fast enough internet connection, it might be faster to download a new copy from the Blizzard App than trying to install the game from DVD. Simply install the app, select your region, log in with a Blizzard Account, then select StarCraft II on the left and click Install. You'll be able to select your game language and installation location. (Installing the game on a native Linux filesystem instead of NTFS might improve loading times.)

{{Note|You need to install {{Pkg|lib32-gnutls}} in order to use the online-mode of the [[Blizzard App]].}}

==== Installing from DVD ====

{{Note|If you have a reasonable internet connection (10Mbps or better), redownload the game. Recent patches were massive and you'll literally spend more time waiting for the game to reconfigure and patch than just redownloading the whole game again. Furthermore, you can stream the game while playing.}}

Launch the game from the Battle.net App.
If the game crashes see troubleshooting section.

== Hints for Performance Tuning ==

* {{ic|Ctrl+Alt+F}} shows FPS.
* Make sure that you are using the latest available graphics drivers. Nvidia drivers should be 256.35 or later (drivers in repositories are up to date).
* Edit the variables.txt in your My Documents/Starcraft II/ following the guide [www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=142046 here].
* If you're using Intel HD Graphics 3000, you may have to set the VideoMemorySize to 128 (see the Configuration above). The game will complain about not enough VRAM otherwise.
* If you have problems updating the game and see the following in the output:
{{bc|Agent started on port #6882
Executing operation: disable_firewall applicationPath="C:\users\Public\Application Data\Battle.net\Agent\Agent.4432\Agent.exe" applicationName="Battle.net Update Agent"
AgentAsAdmin failed to add a firewall exception for 'C:\users\Public\Application Data\Battle.net\Agent\Agent.4432\Agent.exe'.
Registered Event: "shutdown event"
Registered Event: "database flush event"
PostTo succeeded status: 0 for url: enGB.patch.battle.net:1119/patchPost Data:

==== Unit Preloader ====
SC2 never fully loads the game initially, but rather streams and loads required files on demand. Unit Preloader is a special map which forces SC2 to load '''all''' units, animations and effects, '''causing high RAM usage''', but prevents loading the data (and massive framerate drops) during multiplayer matches. Open ''Arcade'' and search for ''Unit Preloader''. There are 3 versions - start the one which corresponds to the game edition you'll want to play in multiplayer and wait for the Victory screen. All data will be preloaded until you exit the game to desktop.

==== Enable CapsLock as a Rapid Fire Hotkey with xmodmap ====
TheCore and TheCore Lite hotkeys rely on CapsLock to be a rapid fire hotkey.
This does not work by default under Linux.
To make it work, CapsLock key could be remapped to another key with [[xmodmap]].
Hereafter an example with "Backspace" character.
$ xmodmap -e "remove Lock = Caps_Lock" -e "keycode 66 = BackSpace"

The .SC2Hotkeys file would need to be modified, to take it into account to add "Backspace" as an alternate wherever CapsLock is used.
You may consider tune your .SC2Hotkeys file with one of those command lines:
$ sed -i -e "s:CapsLock:Backspace:" .SC2Hotkeys # replacement of CapsLock by BackSpace
$ sed -i -e "s:CapsLock:CapsLock,Backspace:" .SC2Hotkeys # easy command copy
$ sed -i -e "s:\([=,]\([=,]\)*CapsLock\):\1,\2Backspace:" .SC2Hotkeys # this one copies any modifier with CapsLock to equivalent with BackSpace

This tip could be used to perform some modifications:
* map CapsLock to Backspace with {{ic|1=caps:backspace}}
* swap left Control and Alt keys with {{ic|1=ctrl:swap_lalt_lctl}}
* turn CapsLock into an additional Control key with {{ic|1=caps:ctrl_modifier}}
$ setxkbmap -option -option "$(localectl | grep Options | sed -e 's/.*Options:\s*//'),ctrl:swap_lalt_lctl,caps:backspace"
{{Tip| All possible options could be found looking in /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/base.lst}}
{{Tip| to get back to the default XKB options, once you exit the game you can use the following code in a script}}
setxkbmap -option -option "$(localectl | grep Options | sed -e 's/.*Options:\s*//')"

== Troubleshooting ==
* You may want to start the game without the launcher: cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/StarCraft\ II\Support (or Support64 for the 64-bit version) and wine SC2Switcher.exe - this might make debugging easier, but you may have to select your region in-game. Furthermore, if your game is not up-to-date, you'll be unable to log in, and no error message will be shown - simply start the Battle.net Launcher and let the game update completely.
* If SC2 instacrashes, or crashes upon game start, try clicking on the Battle.net logo in the Launcher -> Settings -> Game Settings -> Check Launch 32-bit client (instead of 64-bit), or '''uncheck''' it if it's already checked.
* For some, in-game resolution changing does not work. Editing 'width=x' and 'height=y' in Variables.txt in My Documents/Starcraft II solves this issue. Replace x and y with the prefered resolution.
* Should you experience graphics problems (no 3D background in menu, blue non-texturized units and other glitches), launch the game without Battle.net App (see above) like this: force_s3tc_enable=true wine SC2Switcher.exe. You can also add this option to the .desktop entry in ~/.local/share/applications/wine/Programs/StarCraft II, or edit your ~/.drirc file to enable this setting permanently for all apps. Using {{Pkg|driconf}}, you may just enable this setting with a simple GUI.

RE: Migration from ArchWiki by Svitozar Cherepii on Saturday December 23rd 2017, 20:19

Comments for article above:

Direct3D settings
In Wine 1.9.x VRAM amount is almost always detected properly, and StarCraft no longer breaks on low VRAM reported. Most GPUs not reporting VRAM properly usually are either early Intel/AMD integrated GPUs, or some AMD APUs - they almost universally can't handle SC2 on newer patches (system requirements increased). How about removing the VRAM block in the configuration section? DragoonAethis (talk) 20:36, 7 August 2016 (UTC)

Necessity of vcrun6sp6 library

A recent edit suggested that the vcrun6sp6 library needs to be installed with winetricks. However, the game seems to run fine without this library. According to the edit comment, the additional library is supposed to resolve an error 'skin.dll not found', but I am unable to find any evidence that this is an issue for anyone else. I am reverting the edit for now.

If the library really is required, perhaps it should be marked optional in the article? Along with a description of what bug it resolves. --Sirrus233 (talk) 08:08, 17 October 2016 (UTC)

I too have received an annoying fps drop (at an interval like OP) after patch 4.1
I used to have overrides, but I reconfigured a prefix and re-installed SC2 with no overrides and the issue still persists

4.0 Crashes: in Skins menu; befores starting a game by Aleks on Monday November 20th 2017, 14:19

Hi all,

After 4.0 my Bnet client stopped working. Today it updated and now I have Play button back.
Now SC2 crashes. I tried to see the new Ghost skin and my game froze, although the music kept on playing.
Then I tried Unit Preloader arcade and the game crashed fully. I tried starting a Training level and it also crashes:

e_gfxErrorShaderCompileFailed by Forestry Dude on Wednesday November 15th 2017, 22:55

Sorry if I'm noob,....Running Debian Buster Wine-Staging 2.20 Installed fine, I can play regular vanilla starcraft, however, I can't play some arcade maps...for instance...my FAVORITE plz try....Star Battle Omega, it fails with the subject error and sometimes it just hangs, I can play Special Forces Elite 5 without issue, could anyone explain this????? the new patch has been uploaded, but the error was before the 4 patch....Diablo III is garbage and Hots fails also with unexpected error....I run in both 32 bit and 64 bit, some arcade games fail.....Desert Strike for another instance......anyways..thanks

Blizzard dropped XP and Vista support for SC2 in the latest 3.19 game patch. I had the game working under XP 32-bit. The blizzard agent and SC2 work fine in Window 7 32-bit on Ubuntu 16.04 and kernel 4.13. Haven't tried 64 bit.

64-bit version by Hugo Osvaldo Barrera on Saturday September 23rd 2017, 11:57

Looks like the note above saying that the 64-bit version does not work is very out of date right now. I've been playing with the 64-bit version for quite some time now, and have just confirmed that it works platinum with the latest wine-staging. Could a maintainer please remove that note?

SC2 worked very well half a year ago. Today I tried to start it again. Everything works fine, except I cannot see any menus. Starting screen is just a planet in the background. I can navigate around with the F5, F9...-keys and even managed to start a game by blindly clicking everywhere. Game starts normally, just some of the interface is missing graphics. Its pretty much this bug:

I'm running WINE version 2.0 on Lubuntu.
Battle.net (Blizzard App) has installed fine and is working.
SC2 appears to be installing fine (I've installed up until "optimal" says their is still about 10GB left)
Game starts up fine.
I haven't tested the single player campaign options.
However the none of the multiplayer options work.
Multiplayer appears to be working for other people.
Maybe if the game fully installs this problem will fix itself?
I was wondering if anyone else was experience a similar issue.

Core: out of memory errors by Darin Avery on Saturday April 8th 2017, 7:04

Hi,

Since the update last month, the battlenet client stopped working until changing the windows mode to windows xp. That then prevents you from running sc2 in 64 bit mode.

I get consistent "Core: out of memory" errors in co-op mode after making that switch. Some on the blizzard forums say that switching to a 64 bit OS fixes that issue. I'm running in a 64 bit prefix but due to running in windows xp mode, i cannot uncheck the "run 32 bit client" button. So i'm stuck with that problem.

One workaround that has worked for a couple matches is to lower the texture quality from ultra to high.

Same problem here. Switching it to Windows XP mode let me play again, and lowering the texture quality lets me get through a whole match before it goes OOM, but there is also a notable regression to what was already a pathetic (~15fps) framerate during game play. I tried with wine 2.0 and a fresh build of 2.6 with the same results. CSMT makes no difference, to the point I question it's mere existence. Framerates in the main game menus though are paradoxically high. I hope someone comes up with a solution. :(

Core: out of memory errors by Gian Paolo Mureddu on Thursday August 10th 2017, 23:12

Ever since I bought LotV, SC2 in 32-bit will crash with an out of memory error, regardless of the Windows version I set Wine to. Sure enough, the 64-bit client works as expected, but even in a 32-bit arch with Wine, it will cause this error, it is true, that lowering the texture quality will delay the error, but it will still appear even if set at low (eventually), like I said, running under a 32-bit arch (I did just to test this, by the way).

Battle-net installer installs and runs fine. After that installing SC2 went smooth. When i start the game through Battle.net it switches to the loading screen and immediately after that brings me back to Battle.net.
I dont get any crash reports (from SC2 or Battle.net) nor do i get any error messages i can relate to anything (or find solutions on google).

Works but only for a minute or 2 by Shane Fagan on Tuesday January 31st 2017, 9:21

I followed the instructions in the thread, put in the overrides and ran SC2 directly. I tried 3 different versions of WINE and got the same issue with all 3, I tried the DRI3 patched version, CSMT patched wine-staging and vanilla WINE. It crashes in the same way each time which is a pretty simple freeze and then quit. Anyone else getting similar behaviour with WINE 2.0?

RE: Works but only for a minute or 2 by Shane Fagan on Friday February 24th 2017, 16:28

Ok, I figured out the issue, so for the people who want to know how to run SC2 if they are hitting the issue of quitting after a minute or 2 try this out:

1. Install at least WINE 2.0
2. Use a 32bit wine prefix (WINEARCH=win32 if you don't already have a .wine directory otherwise you have to set the WINEPREFIX to something else)
3. Use WINEDEBUG=-all vblank_mode=0 to get the best performance out of it.

I eventually landed on the WINE DRI PPA. It gives great performance and coupled with the MESA_GLSL_CACHE_ENABLE=1 from the new changes to the AMD driver you have pretty much a Windows level of performance.

hey, first of all I'm sorry for my bad english I'm French so I'll try to do my best but please be indulgent.

Os : Debian 8.6 Jessie ~ cinnamon
I've installed the battle net client with wine64 (wine 2-0-rc4). Nothing to say about the client, everything is fine I can read all the stuff and configure what I want, a little bit after testing the client I've installed Sc2. After put different settings on the client, two main bugs have appeared : when I select "launch the game in 32 bits instead of 64" the game crash after the login screen. Fine, now I'm unchecking the box, restarting the game... I can login!
But after a little bit testing, when I try to to play on multiplayer mode, even against the computer, it loads everything and just before beginning the battle, crash. It's very frustrating, and I don't find a similar case, perhaps I've not been searching enough.

Looks like my test results were modified, not only in rating, but in content. I'm not a big fan of these test results being published with my name, but different content (I'd much rather have had the results rejected and edit them myself).

I did not write any of the following, and the appdb lists my as an author, which is, to say the least, quite dishonest:

*****
using 64 bit prefix

if not using wine-staging following overrides are required (corefonts must also be installed):

api-ms-win-crt-math-l1-1-0.dll
ucrtbase.dll

Don't use more overrides as they may cause more issues
*****

What worries me specifically, is that I did not actually confirm this, nor have I given any evidence that points to this (except the first line).
This may even possibly be flat out wrong, but the test results with my name on it publishes this.
Please delete these tests results OR alter the author to whomever wrote this. It's completely unacceptable to publish something with my name on it without my consent.

If posting results relevant to the staing branch is unacceptable, please let me know and I'll refrain from doing so in future.

I was the one who edited your test results, I took the added data from the previous test (which is now showing as I deleted your test, as requested - I cannot edit author).

I edited your results as you did not explicitly say that you were using wine-staging (which does not require any overrides, non staging still does.) I would like to keep the main page relevant to nonstaging so I added the extra info for people landing on the page wondering why SCII does not launch / what overrides they need.
You also did not mention what prefix you are using or the executable version (32/64) of the game you are using.

I am trying to clean this page up as it is still a bit of a mess with incorrect / outdated information.

I apologise for at the least, not notifying you / asking permission before posting.
If there is anything else I can do to rectify this, please let me know.

If you are using pure wine, you get constant crashes with battle.net at libcef. Unless you do winetricks -q corefonts. This is bug 32342. With wine-staging you don't seem to need this.
You may get some internal crash at battl.net after installing corefonts and it shows some id number, just restart the client.
You need to override api-ms-win-crt-math-l1-1-0.dll and ucrtbase.dll to native via winecfg.

Multiplayer crashes with wine1.9.24 by Cory on Sunday December 11th 2016, 14:53

So I try to join a game, it searches for a game, serious graphics issues for 30ms every 6s, and then it just crashes when it tries to load the game.
I'm gonna wait until wine2.0r1 comes to the Ubuntu packages and then I'm gonna try it.
Also, the editor crashes too, so... (I'll test that better when I get wine2.0r1 loaded up)
I'm using the same wineprefix (that is, ~/.wine/ directory) as I did with wine1.9.23, and I'm not sure if that can be an issue as I did use winetricks to install the vcrun2015
Do you think I'll have to reinstall starcraft II when I have wine2.0r1? Because that's like 24+ GB :|

It seems the editor is working again, however I can't run it with CSMT or GalliumNine in wine-staging. I am once again able to login to publish maps to Battle.net (Haven't tested in a while but 2.10-staging works)

Graphic card information is not updated by Robin on Monday December 5th 2016, 20:06

I recently change my Radeon HD 5450 into a RX 480 4G. I noticed that RX 480 info is added in Wine 1.9.24-devel, but in SC2 LotV it shows my card as "ATI Radeon HD 5600 Series" (the same as before with HD 5450) and prevent me applying higher graphic settings. I tried to add DeviceID and VendorID in registry, but it didn't work. How can I make it to "forget" my old card and recognize my new card?

My system is Ubuntu 16.04.1 x64, Wine 1.9.24-devel x64, AMDGPU-Pro 16.40, SC2 x64. All of them are up-to-date.

RE: Graphic card information is not updated by Robin on Wednesday December 7th 2016, 21:20

Hi Ben,

Thank you for your reply. I tried deleting the Account folder, and it doesn't work. I'll try reinstall the game later. I don't know how compatible wine is with amdgpu-pro driver, so hopefully it's not driver issue.

As for my game launch, I launch it from a 64bit Bnet with default configuration. DLL overrides are as recommended (native, builtin):

I'm not 100% sure my launch is 64bit, but in Bnet game settings, launch 32-bit client (instead of 64-bit) is unchecked. Except for the wrong graphic card info, I have no problem launching the game and playing campaign. The only issue is when I quit the game, most of the time it freezes, and I have to switch to another display and kill the process.

RE: Graphic card information is not updated by Robin on Thursday December 8th 2016, 8:13

My game still crashes on exit when adding WINEDEBUG=-all. I think whether to crash is related to how much resources it has used.

As for driver, I'm afraid amdgpu-pro is the only driver currently available that supports rx480. I believe the driver is correctly installed, as Ubuntu recognize my graphics as "AMD Radeon (TM) RX 480 Graphics".

RE: Graphic card information is not updated by Jarkko Korpi on Monday December 26th 2016, 0:12

The latest wine 2.0.rc3. That patch is not currently at any wine version. I submited it to staging also. You need to compile wine and add that patch. It adds support for closed source driver for rx480. The gpu settings arent limited after that patch in SC2.

lotv crashes after 5 minutes of play by starcraft player on Wednesday November 30th 2016, 22:44

I installed PlayOnLinux for legacy of the void, and have no problems starting battle.net and stacraft 2. However, after about 5 minutes of excellent gameplay, the sc2 freezes and I'm unable to exit without a hard reboot.

I'm on ubuntu 14.04 and using wine 1.9.24 64 bit (all the other version of wine didn't work for me). My computer is fairly good, with 32GB memory, intel i7, and Nvidia card with 4 GB, so I don't believe it's related to hardware.

Has anyone else experienced this problem, and if so, how did you resolve it?

RE: lotv crashes after 5 minutes of play by Ben Parsons on Thursday December 1st 2016, 0:56

What dll overrides are you using?
Also try using the staging branch with CSMT enabled (this also gives drastically better performance)
I have found personally that using a 64 bit prefix causes the game to crash, try using a 32 bit prefix

RE: lotv crashes after 5 minutes of play by starcraft player on Friday December 2nd 2016, 17:00

Didn't know I needed to override dlls and also run with CSMT until you mentioned it-- I did both and everything has been running fine for about an hour... fingers crossed. It does seem to crash when I try to exit, but at least I get to play. Thanks for the post!

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Then I got the freeze on quit. I resolved the issue by adding (disabled):

dbghelp

DO NOT add this override on battle.net or it won't launch anymore. This needs to be set on SC2.exe only.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I got the weird behavior from redshift too. May it be on lauch or during ladder game loading, the color temp resetted for a sec which was very annoying. The fix was in one of the bug issue (bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=37849). You need to add a registry key to prevent wine from touching at this.

Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Wine.
Then add the "X11 Driver" key.

Inside the newly created "X11 Driver" add the chain value "UseXVidMode" and set it to "N".

RE: StarCraft II still freezes on quit even with dbghelp disabled by Cory on Friday November 25th 2016, 8:30

So StarCraft II still freezes when I hit the Quit button when in StarCraft II login (not the Battle.net App).
Even when I have dbghelp disabled in winecfg.
I run StarCraft II like this:
cd ~
cd '.wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/StarCraft II/Support64'
WINEDEBUG=-all wine SC2Switcher_x64.exe

Urgh, got my hopes up for a second. I'm sorry this doesn't work for you.
It is just so weird that the app doesnt behave the same on two identical wine version.

Is it a clean prefix? Did you install vcrun2015?

I actually installed it instead of just using the overrides (and removed the unnecessary ones that winetricks adds) even though I read somewhere that you can do without, hence my question.
At this point, I'm just looking at the possible differences between our setups. It works 100% of the time for me. That much I guarantee.

Sooooooo......
I downloaded the Battle.net desktop thing.
Installed it all good.
had it download StarCraft TWO.
all good.
Press the Play Button.....................
The button turns to "Launching" or whatever.
And then it goes back to "Play"
:(
GOTO Press the Play Button.............

bash winetricks vcrun2015 #doesn't help
#switching to 32-bit mode through the Battle.net App didn't help
#calling 'StarCraft II.exe' with -launch didn't help
#Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

#Things I could try:
#-changing Windows version in winecfg
#-Killing all of the .exe's that are running and then re-run
#-Try the DLL-overrides described on this page.
#-Research various StarCraft II.exe command-line options to see
# if it could run another way

Aha! So I'm 73% sure this should work:
1) make sure SC2 is not running:
`ps aux | grep .exe'
So kill as necessary.
2) in the battle.net app configure starcraft II to have extra command-line options. In this case, add this:
-win
This will tell StarCraft II to run in window mode (although it looks full-screen). And that's how I got StarCraft II to actually run, versus the button going from "Launching.." to "Play" and nothing happening.

The game has me stuck on the 'connecting to battle.net' screen upon entering my account name and pressing 'connect'.
I can log in through the b.net launcher, but not into StarCraft 2.
This problem didn't come with patch 3.7, but just today.
Am I alone with this?

RE: Starcraft 3.6.0...which is now Starcraft 3.8.0 by Cory on Tuesday November 22nd 2016, 19:49

I prefer going:
cd .wine/drive_c/Program\ Files\ \(x86\)/Battle.net
wine Battle.net.exe
# because it auto-updates StarCraft II when it's out of date
# and to play all you have to do is click the Play button
# and Authentication is automatic from the Battle.net Desktop App
# so you don't have to login when in StarCraft II.

Latest update 3.6.0 results in crash on start by Aleks on Wednesday September 14th 2016, 14:54

Hi all,
I just updated and after battle.net, and Artanis loading screen loads, the game crashes within few seconds on main screen. I hear the game music, buttons are visible, there is black bachground instead of stars or anything and then it crashes.

PlayOnLinux Mint, wine 1.9.15. I tried and can't get any higher version of wine to even boot.

I had the exact same issue (wine 1.9.17, 32bit installation).
As suggested in the "works only in 64 bit mode" thread I tried out adding the api-ms-win-crt-math-l1-1-0 override, and it stopped these crashes.
Haven't had time to play a game yet, but I could log in and the menus work normally.

My fps is 60 at the menus and 20 or so during campaign missions and light co-ops. Anything more heavy-duty like mutations or 2v2 and it becomes unplayable at less than 1 fps. Note that this is with /Medium/ graphics, not Ultra as Windows is able to handle.

There is some regression ... somwhere (newer SC2 or nwere wine?). After months of non-playing, the performance in StarCraft II is now abysmal - i.e. non-playable. I get 5-10fps if I start any mission at medium details (1080p), didn't even bother to try any further - on quite decent hardware:

If I turn details to low, I get ~30FPS. I used to get more than playable FPS at high or ultra waaay back... maybe 6-12 months ago. That was on a 32bit wine install, though, but I needed to wipe out ~/.wine and re-install battle.net since the 32bit version refused to run at all anymore.

I tried to enable CSMT (in wine-staging) and although did improve things, but just a little bit (maybe like 8FPS->15FPS). Performance is nowhere near where it should be and used to be (even without CSMT - at least I do not remember ever enabling it before!).

I tried some other demanding games (like Bioshock Infinite - native in Linux) to rule out some weird HW issue, and everything seems to work properly (didn't try other Wine games, since I haven't gamed via wine in the recent times at all so I don't have any installed ATM, so I'm not sure if it is just wine or just SC2).

It is possible you have the same problem as I do, but I've figured out I get a massive FPS improvement if I set WINEDEBUG="-all". Without that I get around 1/6th of the FPS than I get with WINEDEBUG="-all".

Now I get mostly constant 60FPS (probably capped by vsync, which I have on) at ULTRA graphics settings. So I'm happy =).

Btw. search for "WINEDEBUG" on this page for the comment from 2013, this may be related. Maybe the staging patches have propagated further?

If this is affecting multiple users, maybe this should be added to the top of the page?

There are still some slowdowns, which I didn't get before - mostly when portraits come on screen, and during some cutscreens (like exploding vespene fissures at a protoss proloque mission). But they don't impact gameplay, unless you are playing competitively online vs humans. Also, I get similar slowdowns at some Linux native games, too (which weren't there before), so it may be some kind of bug in NVidia drivers (it is as if something, that should be in RAM/VRAM, is not there and is being extracted / moved around when it is actually used - there is a 'jerk' when this 'something' is processed).

p.s. I figured this WINEDEBUG thing out by using Battle.net via POL... I noticed that I get decent frame rates even with the system wine version via POL. Then I tried with plain wine with the WINEPREFIX dir created by POL - and the slowdown was still there. It was easy to look at the shortcut, what is the remainig difference in how Battle.net was launched - and really WINEDEBUG was the only one I could find, and seems it the actual cuplrit currently.

I installed vcrun2015 via winetricks and added mscvcp140 and vcruntime140 via winecfg. For that I had to install winbind and cabextract via apt-get install. Then the logs showed that wininet produces a lot of error, so I installted wininet via winetricks. After getting some d3* errors I installed all d3*-dlls via winetricks.

I'm using wine 1.9.16 with xubuntu 16.04 and Starcraft works with the configuration mentioned in the aditional comments but, when I try to close the game get stuck, every time I do alt+tab the game simply vanishes and when I try to play again an arcade game it simply doesn't work I have to reopen the game every time I want to play. Does anybody know anything that could help me?

I've never had the alt-tab issue you mentioned. A couple tips:
1) you could try disable compositing. xubuntu may be using a lean/minimal compositor- so disable it before starting the game.
2) running the game in a separate X-server will work: forum.winehq.org/viewtopic.php?p=64164So you ctrl+alt+F7 to get back to your desktop, then ctrl+alt+F8 to get back to your game. This is instead of alt-tabbing.

Battle.net.exe continues to run in background eating up a core, same with wineserver64, Agent.exe, and Battle.net Help. That's 4 of my 6 cores eaten while a game updates.
cpulimit -l 1 -p on each worked and GUI is still responsive. When game is running Battle.net.exe still eats a core so cpulimit -l 1 slows it down (and frees up wineserver64 to better serve the game).

I also ran into the wait for critical section bug in Ryan's Aug 1 2016 test (due to unreleased semaphore). Terminating all exe's and wine processes, then restarting solved the issue. The bug occurred to me with the Battle.net.exe GUI, clicking pause/resume on an update quickly.

I'm using wine-development 1.9.14-1 though Debian. It's not clear to me if that has CSMT enabled; I don't see a tab for CSMT in winecfg.
Kernel: 3.16.0-4-amd64
GPU: NVIDIA [GeForce 9800 GT] (rev a2)

Are you even seeing the Battle.net GUI? To be clear I meant restarting the Battle.net app, as buttons and such became unresponsive when waiting on that critical section. If I killed it then restarted it without killing all exe's and wine processes then it would still be stuck on that critical section (unreleased semaphore/mutex/whatever).

Well, it's true for fedora, for example.
You can install wine package from default repo, which is a wine-staging, but a bit outdated. It's just named wine, but not a vanila wine.
NOTE: there is no vanila wine in fedora repo.
Arch distro have both, wine(vanila from winehq, no csmt included) and wine-staging as a separate package.

Performance since last update by Hugo Osvaldo Barrera on Monday June 20th 2016, 14:46

After the recent game update (a few days ago, can't recall when), I saw a huge performance drop in. It was extremely noticeable and i was forced to reduce graphic settings (those affecting CPU) from High to Medium to have the same performance I used to.

Has anyone else had this issue? I believe that the game update was the only recent change.

Note that CPU usage is ~40% and 70% on two CPUs, while the other 6 sit idle.

RE: Performance since last update by Ryan on Tuesday July 19th 2016, 0:50

Sorry, figured out why mine was slow, you should be using wine-staging with CSMT enabled. Should fix the low fps, it did for me. I was using it before but forgot I reinstall my root and formatted my home and somehow forgot that I had enabled CSMT in the past and forgot this time... lol

I'm having a problem where it frees the whole X session after exiting the game. During play it seems ok, but when i leave I need to go to another screen and restart X. It's OK if just run battle.net then exit, but if I go into the game and come out it freezes.

Similar thing here with 1.9.11 devel, Ubuntu 14.04 x64. After updated to 1.9.12 devel today, it freezes even during the gameplay. Unfortunately, I don't have another screen to work on, so I have to press the little reset button and let the machine reboot. I thought it was my machine's idiosyncratic problem but now seems isn't.

RE: Freezes after game exit. by Casey on Saturday June 18th 2016, 9:37

Robin,

This won't solve anything, but it would prevent you from having to hard boot...

Either switch to a different terminal using Ctl-Alt-(any function key up to F6). My graphical terminal is F7... your's may be different. Or you could enable another workspace and hotkey over to it when the game freezes. That's what I've been doing.

RE: Freezes after game exit. by Casey on Saturday June 18th 2016, 9:32

Exact same problem here. Kubuntu 16.04 x64, Wine 1.9.12. Gameplay is fine until I hit exit game... then it just locks into place. Tried killing all referring processes. Had to kill Wine. Even then I think something keeps control because my CPU and GPU temps stay hot. I end up having to restart.

Another issue I noticed was that no menus in Battle.Net work. Had to get to settings via the friends listing dialog box. Buttons work... 'News', 'Store', and all that but not menus.

RE: Crashes after a few seconds after match starts by termac on Saturday June 4th 2016, 4:46

This could be related to too high Graphic settings in combination with the 32 bit Client of Starcraft. Best solution would be to use the 64 bit client (select in Battle.net App or launch Support64/SC2Switcher_x64.exe from the SC2 installation directory) if you are for some reason stuck with the 32 bit Version, try setting Texture Quality and/or Shaders in SC2 to low.

RE: Crashes after a few seconds after match starts by Oriol on Tuesday June 7th 2016, 23:35

I'm using the 64 bit client. Moreover, I've tried setting all the graphics levels to low and it still doesn't work. After a few seconds of playing, the whole program crashes. Any other suggestion? Thanks!

RE: Crashes after a few seconds after match starts by David Brooks on Tuesday June 7th 2016, 23:38

I had a problem like this that was related to my video card overheating. Turns out one of the fans on the GPU had died and it was getting up to 97c. After I replaced the bad GPU fan the video card no longer overheated and SC2 ran fine.

RE: Crashes after a few seconds after match starts by Oriol on Wednesday June 8th 2016, 0:03

That's weird. My card is quite new and, according to nvidia-settings, it's at ~59 degrees C at the moment of the crash (just re-checked right now), which should be a near optimal temperature. Thanks for the suggestion, though! Anything else you think I could check?

Also, is there any way I can see the error message from the crash? Any logs I could check?

RE: Crashes after a few seconds after match starts by Oriol on Thursday June 9th 2016, 1:47

For whatever reason, after following the next steps everything went back to normal and I can play the game again:

- I launched sc2 with "WINEDEBUG=all ..."
- I played a campaign game (first level of LotV on Brutal), and everything worked.
- I played a multiplayer game, unranked, choosing Random and everything worked (that's when the crash usually occurred).
- I set the parameters to Medium and High (Textures).
- I played another multiplayer game, unranked, choosing Random and everything worked.
- I quit and relaunched from the command line without the WINEDEBUG variable
- I played a multiplayer game, unranked, choosing Random and everything worked.
- I quit and relaunched by double-clicking the Starcraft 2 icon I have on my desktop
- I played a multiplayer game, unranked, choosing Random and everything worked.

So, not sure what is it that I did, but now I can play again, with High settings, and it runs beautifully smooth. Notice that I haven't restarted the machine nor updated any packages since the last time I tried (yesterday). The science of computer science...

RE: Crashes after a few seconds after match starts by termac on Saturday June 11th 2016, 5:00

So I assume it crashed again, during a ladder game. I get occasional crashes too and have not find the cause. What worked for me 100% of the time as work around is the following.
When I start SC2 I got to the Campaign screen, and go the master archive. After that is finished loading and you see the menu with missions to select, I just leave it (click cancel) and then can play any amount of Ladder games without SC2 crashing. I know it sounds like vodoo, but for me it always works.

Regarding the WINEDEBUG output, that might be related to Playonlinux.
You need to call wine directly from the command line with the environment variable WINEDEBUG set.
In your case you also need to figure out which version of wine Playonlinux is using and use that one in your call.
Additionally Playonlinux uses a seperate wine prefix which must be specified in the environment variable WINEPREFIX.
Depending on how comfortably you are with handling these things, it might be easier to try with vanilla wine (or better wine-staging for the csmt patches).

The other source for debug output are the log files SC2 creates on a crash itself. It creates a seperate folder for each crash with detailed information in the folder I mentioned in a post above.

RE: Crashes after a few seconds after match starts by Oriol on Saturday June 11th 2016, 20:41

This totally worked! Thanks a ton!

PS: Haven't checked the log files, but I managed to "try" to run the game with WINEDEBUG=all, but there were thousands of output lines and the game never really start. I am definitely a newbie in terms of wine, and not comfortable at all debugging this.

RE: Crashes after a few seconds after match starts by chris on Sunday June 19th 2016, 11:17

Apparently, I also have these crashes. All versions above Wine-Staging 1.9.8 are crashing at the beginning of the game, in about ~15 seconds.

I tested it with PlayOnLinux and directlty with Wine itself through Terminal. These crashes are appearing at 32bit and 64bit. I'm using Ubuntu LTS 14.04 and an proprietary Nvidia driver with the version 352.63 (latest).

If I use Wine-Staging 1.9.8, all works flawlessly at ~200 fps.
But if I use Wine-Staging 1.9.12, I have ~300 fps. With low settings.

Voice and subtitle would go much faster than the cinematic. by Sethan on Saturday May 21st 2016, 10:18

Hi,

I played "Starcraft II Heart of the Swarm" last night.
I could see clearly that, during the cinematic play,
the voice and subtitle would go much faster than the cinematic,
especially if it is a long cinematic one.

Game crashing while playing by HellBat on Saturday April 16th 2016, 14:26

Hi I'm running SC2 with wine 1.9.7 and Debian strethc/sid kernel 4.5.0-trunk-amd64 game is running better then it was when using POL, but now I have two issues while I'm playing game simply crash and hang on exit.
I've already installed winetricks corefonts and others stuff in the library tab there is configured
atl80, atl90, msvcm80, msvcm90, msvcp80, msvcp90, msvcr80, msvcr90, vcomp and vcomp90. All native and built-in. I'm wondering if I can get any help about this.

RE: Game crashing while playing by HellBat on Monday April 25th 2016, 7:45

I've been searching for solutions to this problem, so I find at the gamelogs lots of files referring to D3D9 Reset, so I added to winecfg libraries the d3d9, d3dx9_43 and mshtml, the graphics are better, game FPS increased and no more crashing at least till now. I'll be watching to see if the problem continue happening and if I find something I'll add here.

Hey, after I installed wine version 1.9.6 (staging, see below) I am able to run StarCraft II again, unfortunately after a while my sound randomly stops working.

Sometimes preceding by a very short and tiny cracking noise.
The really strange thing is, that until the sound stops, its working perfectly fine!

ANY idea by what this can be caused?!

wine 1.9.6 (staging)
(T)ubuntu 12.04
StarCraft II: 3.2.1

I have pulseaudio installed (which I don't like) and before StarCraft 2 was updated to 3.2.0 everything was running smoothly without pulseaudio (but ALSA, which I prefer).

Any idea what I could do? It is very annyoing because I've never ever had any sound related problems before.
Also, mb worth to mention: 1. I am not the only one having sound issues with wine and this version of SC2 and also
the sound stops to work within ~20-30(+) sec after the game is loaded. So the sound stops working even within
the menus. ANY help would be greatly appreciated. And plzz Blizzard do a Linux port plllzzzzz!

Ok, hey there wine developers.
I just wanted to say a BIG thank you!
I do not know what you did, but after I've downloaded the latest wine update (1.9.8. staging) the sound seems to be working fine again.
Thank you so much! I've tried a lot of tweaking for the past 3 weeks and nothing seems to work, but the latest update as it seems.
Thank you!

RE: Screen freezing/unable to play after patch 3.2.0.41743 by shaun rutherford on Thursday March 31st 2016, 10:15

I'm having the same issue, this feels like the same bug that caused Heroes of the Storm to become unplayable a few patches ago. The game can be launched but as soon as you enter a match it freezes. Tried this on Crossover linux 15.0.1, wine-staging and wine 1.9.3. 32 and 64bit were tried.

network bug after game update 3.2.0.41743 by Aleks on Thursday March 31st 2016, 4:57

After latest Blizzard update of StarCraft2 my client does not connect to their servers. It gives me error
"Can't connect to battle net
Battle.net may be temporarily unavailable or your internet connection may be down. Please check your connection and try again."

I have copied working game files from Windows installation, and Blizzard servers are not the problem.
Before the update I had no issues playing.

RE: network bug after game update 3.2.0.41743 by Jason on Thursday March 31st 2016, 21:30

Me too. I just recently installed and updated of course to game update 3.2.0.41743 and as soon as I start SC2 the network goes down. I have access to download/update until I start SC2 and then I get
"Can't connect to battle net
Battle.net may be temporarily unavailable or your internet connection may be down. Please check your connection and try again."

RE: network bug after game update 3.2.0.41743 by Aleks on Saturday April 2nd 2016, 10:09

OK, I managed to fix my game:
In PlayOnLinux, I clicked Install a Program (+ sign) and added Battle.net. After successfull installation I was sure to setup the "dbghelp" override to disabled.
I added the starcraft2 install folder to the battle net launcher and it works now.

The problem before was that I was starting bNet and SC2 via double click on exe files and those used my default wine 1.6.2 prefix.

PlayOnLinux has other prefixes, now two for me: one for bNet and another for SC2 WoL.

For Diablo 3 I changed /etc/pulse/daemon.conf default-fragment-size-msec to something below 5, this made Starcraft 2 crash with the mentioned error.
Works again after changing it back, however sound gets garbled in Diablo 3.
So change the mentioned value to 5, run pulseaudio -k and then sudo service pulseaudio start.
Workaround for Diablo 3: change the Sound Channels dropbox in sound options in Diablo 3 to something else, it will temporarily fix it.

There remains an issue with setting shaders to anything but low.
This can be worked around for now with setting a dll overwrite for msvcr100.dll as described in this seperate bugzilla entry bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39954#c6 .

Thank you for updating the notes. The 64 bit client fixes all issues regarding crashes with higher graphic settings. Maybe you can mention that there, so people know it is worth trying the 64 bit version.

For me if I leave the Battle.net launcher open in the background it will eat CPU usage, one core will constantly be at 100% load after it's been open a while (it doesn't do it straight away). Needless to say, closing it and launching Starcraft II.exe directly has a slight performance gain

Legacy of the Void campaign crash by treba on Friday November 13th 2015, 9:35

When starting the lotv campaign, the game crashed for me.
The fix was that i had to set the texture quality down from ultra (low works, didn't yet test the other options).
I guess with textures set to ultra, the app exeeds the memory limit for 32-bit in missions with so much stuff.

Version 3.0.1.38535 working great again by Matthew Krafczyk on Sunday October 18th 2015, 16:03

After updating to wine-staging 1.7.53, and getting the 3.0.1.38535 patch installed automatically via battle.net, I'd like to report that SC2 is working great again! I haven't encountered any crashes even after several missions.

running either the 32bit version of SC2 in 64bit wine, or installing SC2 in a win32 wineprefix will allow the game to launch, however I've found that depending on the mission and units you are using, the game will crash very often. It's nearly unplayable like this.

Issues with nvidia by Hugo Osvaldo Barrera on Sunday July 12th 2015, 23:42

The game works perfectly at lowest settings on an Intel HD 5000, but with the same settings on an nvidia gtx8800 (+Bulldozer FX 8150, 16GB RAM), I get lots of visual artefacts, and occasional crashes in the menu (*never* in-game!).

Is anyone else having these issues? Maybe my card is too old and has some drive issues or alike? :(

UseGLSL disabled had the most dramatic effect on performance. If I enabled medium shaders in game without that option the performance was horrible. After I set that I could enable medium shaders no problem.

Single Player campaign savegames not working by Gian Paolo Mureddu on Monday May 11th 2015, 17:55

About a week ago, I fired up SC2 just for kicks and tried to finish the single player campaign, only I was quite surprised with the results: I was not able to load some of the single player savegames I had (in victory screens or Joey Rays/Hyperion/Char), however I was able to load any given checkpoint, only to be greeted with the opening in game cinematic upon completing the maps. So then I thought "this must be a patch [SC2] thing", so I restarted the SP campaign and lo and behold: Savegames are misbehaving: When trying to load an advanced (say fourth mission victory or on the Hyperion) savegame, upon loading I'd be greeted by the same in game opening cinematic, as if I was starting a new campaign... I'm not sure this is a "Wine thing", but rather something different, has anyone encountered this yet?

I run SC2 with wine version "System", which on my Fedora 21 means 1.7.41.

RE: Single Player campaign savegames not working by Gian Paolo Mureddu on Monday May 25th 2015, 20:20

The prefix is on ext4, BUT the game itself is on the btrfs drive (made available to the main Bnet prefix [where Blizzard gams are "installed"] through symlink. Will try moving the game files to the ext4 drive and try from there.

RE: Single Player campaign savegames not working by Chris on Saturday June 13th 2015, 9:38

This is happening to me too, and I'm not using BTRFS, it's all ext4. I'm able to properly load any save that's a checkpoint in a mission, but whenever I try to load an autosave from after a mission, or a manual save that's on the ship, it starts me out at the beginning of the game. If I keep playing the game without quitting, there's no issue, only when attempting to load a save. This is driving me crazy!

RE: Single Player campaign savegames not working by Chris on Saturday June 13th 2015, 10:54

I use wine-staging, so I submitted a bug there:
bugs.wine-staging.com/show_bug.cgi?id=385but I'm fairly sure the bug is the same in both versions. If you can get console output from Support/SC2Switcher.exe and submit a bug to the Bugzilla here, it'd be much appreciated. (I need a PulseAudio driver for my sound to work correctly, which is why I switched.)

RE: Single Player campaign savegames not working by Chris on Friday June 19th 2015, 20:29

Blizzard suggested I delete the cache, which they said was in ProgramData, but I found it in users/Public/Application Data instead. Deleted the Blizzard Entertainment folder there, loaded the latest mission checkpoint, saved again after that and then I was able to load that save. I'm only mostly sure deleting that folder was the solution, because I also had a Wine update that same day.

Using linux mint 17 64 bit. I installed SC2 in a playonlinux drive, and could hit enter to start chat and tab through recipients, but enter only tabbed through as well. Hotkeys for units & buildings didn't work.

Solution is to change your pol drive to 64 bit. I was using 32 bit. So install 1.7.28 64 bit wine, then create the pol drive, move your sc2 files to the new drive, and go. All keyboard problems fixed.

What version of wine are you using, and what SC2 installer? I just checked, and the installer from the website ( dist.blizzard.com/downloads/sc2-installers/full/StarCraft-II-Setup-enUS.exe ) worked fine in a clean prefix on wine 1.7.31.

i have the following problem. I launch the enGB installer with the wine Starcraft2-enGB.exe command from the console and the installer starts. I got to the point were game says optimal and played a about 10 minutes. I've exited and let the installer finish. Installer finished but now when I start the game after authentication it starts loading the welcome page and exits. My configuration is this

Recently I launched StarCraft II (which had worked perfectly in the past) and after updating it said something about a "new and exciting way to launch StarCraft through battle net" or some other nonsense like that. I said "ok" and now it doesn't launch with an "unexpected error"

i can get the game up, but when i press play, the game goes into full screen mode, however my desktop shrinks into a smaller mode, leaving my mouse either invisible (most of the time) and only operating in the shrunken desktop.

This error went away after using the provided mount command (# mount -o ro,unhide,uid=1000 /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom), but I then ran into another BattleNet related error. Using the downloadable installer resolved that new issue.

I just can't get the CSMT-Wine version to work. Everything else works... "well", but when I try the 1.7.10-CSMT or 1.7.4-CSMT (precompiled) it shows the b-net-launcher window for about 3 seconds till it crashes.

A HOW-TO for FGLRX users! by Change on Thursday February 20th 2014, 12:16

I've read about a lot of people struggling with fglrx problems, but I've managed to get great performance for starcraft with fglrx with no bugs/glitches (as far as I've tested). So I thought I'd post a HOW-TO for people who want to run their AMD video hardware with the fglrx drivers. Here's what I did:

Install Opensuse 13.1 (make sure you choose the default KDE desktop).

Install all Opensuse 13.1 updates through the update manager.

Install 7zip through the add/remove software link in the launcher.

Install libpulse032bit the same way (just search for pulseaudio). If you don't install this, you will have no sound!

Installing libpulse032bit will automatically install the 32 bit alsa libs you will need as well.

search the opensuse website (or duckduckgo.com) for 'one click install fglrx opensuse'. This will take you to the one click installation page for the fglrx drivers. Of course select the 13.1 driver package and install. It suggests 2 repos to be added, but only one selected, so I selected the other repo too. I don't know if that makes a difference. You'll want to restart after installation of the drivers to allow them to start.

The same way as above, search for one click installation of playonlinux for Opensuse 13.1. I used the 4.2.2 version of Playonlinux. I don't mess with the repo settings suggested on this one.

Once in PlayOnLinux I don't use the script to install it, but you can if you want. I just keep a copy of SC2 installed on a flash drive and copy the folder over (within the program file of the virtual c drive that I create through playonlinux). It saves me the update process when I distro hop. I can confirm that it will install though, I've tested it.

VERY important point though is that you need to click 'tools', 'manage wine versions', and install 32-bit wine 1.7.4 - CSMT (1.7.10 - CSMT has regressions for me) and use that on your playonlinux drive for SC2. Also that drive will need vcrun2005, but you don't have to worry about that one if you used the script to install, it installs vcrun2005 for you. Then configure your playonlinux SC2 drive to use the 1.7.4 CSMT wine version.

I've used this on both my AMD FX-4350 system with an AMD 6670 video card AND my HP dv6z-6c00 laptop that has an AMD 3550mx llano chip with an added 7690M (6750M) DDR5 discrete video card. Both machines are working flawlessly for me, including voice chat and all (That's quit a feat with my custom ordered laptop specs, plus I do have a boost of performance from the discrete card. I've tweaked with it and can verify that the discrete card is working).

Maybe I'm lucky or I have 'just the right' video cards, but it all works great for me. I hope this helps someone else get their rig running the way they want it. If you have a beefier card, like a 6850 or above, try out the r600g driver (built into the kernel). It may not have the same performance as the prop, but you're already on linux, might as well fully support Free Software (as much as you can).

patcher doesn't work when installed to ntfs-volume by snejjj on Sunday January 19th 2014, 3:04

I tried installing SC2 to the ntfs formatted volume I use for data storage.
The first installation runs without problems, but when I exit the patcher and start it again, I get an Error saying something like "unable to change permissions of important file. Please log in as Administrator".
Installing it on an ext4-volume works fine.

Any ideas, how I could get it working on ntfs? Is this a bug, I should report?

"Supported file systems:
Wine should run on most file systems. A few compatibility problems
have also been reported using files accessed through Samba. Also,
NTFS does not provide all the file system features needed by some
applications. Using a native Unix file system is recommended."

You may be able to get SC2 working on NTFS, but I wouldn't count on many people being able to provide help in this area :\

RE: FPS .....we at it AGAIn by fengshaun on Monday September 16th 2013, 15:38

All the info is in the bug report. You need to download wine sources and apply the patches and then compile it. To enable csmt, search for "how to enable csmt in wine" (I believe it's a registry key). As for __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS=1, just prefix the wine command with it like so:

I managed to install SC2 from the DVD on Debian. It appeared to actually download the first patch, but then said it was "updating the updater" and wouldn't continue. Every time I restart it now, it says it's applying patch 1 of 24 and that there are 0 kb remaining but then pops up saying it's checking for updates and gets stuck there.

I checked a couple of things that fixed similar problems for others. I do have libasound2:i386 and libjpeg8:i386. (I'm on a 64-bit OS.) I installed IE6 using Winetricks. I tried downloading the patches using a Bittorrent client but that didn't help. (Also, it only downloaded about 8 megs. All the patches are around 14 gigs.)

I'm not finding any more solutions. Anyone have any more ideas? I'm getting withdrawals.

Since submitting the "garbage" report, I have done a significantly larger amount of testing to no avail. After testing all sorts of combinations of clean 32-bit and 64-bit WINE prefixes with and without various winetricks overrides, I sought others to reproduce my issue. Two other people running ~testing Gentoo amd64 (I'm on ~testing) were able to get SC2 installed on a clean 64 bit prefix using a method I exactly reproduced, but to no avail. Furthermore, they confirmed we had comparable USE flags for WINE. Glancing at console output would very tentatively suggest the issue is net-related, but I cannot ascertain what. I have exhausted my personal ability to attempt fix the issue, so if any of you have any ideas, I am open to suggestions.

Failed to run a required program (BLIZZARD SETUP) Error code: BLZPTS0000J by Oliver on Thursday August 15th 2013, 14:57

I have been surfing forums for weeks, trying to solve this problem. I've installed several versions of wine, including the recommended (for WOL) 1.5.10. x86, through playonlinux.

I always receive this error. I have gone through playonlinux's game list, and installed it from there, and also used the option to install a file from another directory. I install the game from cd, and it goes well until i'm ready to update, it goes to 100% and then shows this. I've installed the ie6 package, the dotnet40 package, and i had 2 seperate virtual drives WITH AND WITHOUT the plugin mono.
and the DLL overrides in winecfg (set to WIN XP):
dnsapi (bullitin)
mshtml (native)

before i added those though, i noticed another mshtml (native, bullitin). should i remove that one? ok, continuing.

i had tested on one virtual drive where i manually browsed for the cd's installation, and another drive where i went into the gametab on playonlinux, and found starcraft. the manual way made sound problems for me, and the video would skip too fast in the installation window. i'm sure that can be fixed, but the other way did not create any installation problems. both arrive at the problem in the subject of this post. there's a link for the error code:
(THIS IS THE ONE I RECEIVE: BLZPTS0000J)
us.battle.net/support/en/article/BLZBNTBTS0000J

i've tried running S2Switcher from the support folder. I can't find the agent.exe anywhere in the recommended locations in other forum posts. ( wine .wine/drive_c/users/Public/Application\ Data/Battle.net/Agent/Agent.exe --nohttpauth )

i've tried installing it from the installation file available at battle.net, and i receive a different error, before installation even begins:
"No installer data could be found. If this problem persists, please contact Blizzard Technical Support."
i ignored the installer from battle.net method from here, because i felt one step closer just using the cd, with a full installation. the problem after i install with the cd, is the updater.

RE: Failed to run a required program (BLIZZARD SETUP) Error code: BLZPTS0000J by Oliver on Friday August 23rd 2013, 23:05

Just in case of the scenario where this is being ignored because i put blizzard setup in parenthesis, I just want to clear something: It actually said that in the error, in parenthesis. That's not me adding it in. I understand that error code is one many got in the past, but it was for "(Agent)". not "Blizzard Setup".

I've also tried the echo 0 | sudo tee /proc/sys/kernel/yama/ptrace_scope command, just I forgot to add it in my original post

Well this is because the downloader is creating 10gb worth of files on your disk, so at first it will act slow and sluggish....

WAIT a while

open system monitor and look at the cpu tab and we need to kill a few running processes... im on ubuntu you can open it by running gnome-system-monitor in terminal

there were a few processes running that i pretty much closed the ones that looked like they were opened by the launcher EXCEPT agent.exe, blizzard-launcher.exe, wineserver , and explorer.exe services.exe ...

I closed stuff like rundll.exe nc.exe winedevice.exe plugplay.exe , there was some weird KDEsomething.exe , which is weird I dont use KDE.. There was one specific one I cant remember the name of but it was probably the reason why it worked, it had a weid name like kublow.exe or something, after i closed these the installer started to progress, and im installing it now .. hope this helps someone

The Blizzard Launcher lunches fine, does some updating/checking stuff, and I get to the installation splash screen. I select the directory and click install, and nothing happens. The progress stays at 0.0%, and if I click on the options in the top left, the downloader preferences are greyed out. Same for info>connection information.

Same sort of problem with D3 installer as well, where the launcher seems to run fine except for the not downloading anything part.

I installed the game with no problems, but found it nearly unplayable from low fps. I was running at about 9-18 fps before this fix. Now I'm running at 60 fps consistently.

For me, the problem was that wine wasn't causing my nvidia gpu to adjust it's clock speed. To solve this problem, the nvidia driver needs to be set to maximum performance. This can be done in two ways.

1.) Run your Nvidia X Server Settings program and under your GPU (GPU 0 for me) select PowerMizer. You'll see a drop menu at the bottom. By default, it's set to adaptive. Change this to "Prefer Maximum Performance." This setting will only be effective during your current x server session.

2.) Force your driver to always run your GPU at maximum performance. Note that this method will reduce battery life for laptops. To do this open the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf with your text editor of choice. Make sure you do so with root permissions. Under the section titled "Device" you will need to add the following line:

This is the method that worked to increase my performance. I don't promise the same results to anyone else. If you have an nvidia gpu and are experiencing difficulties with your performance in game then it might be worth a shot.

I can only verify that this is a Starcraft 2 problem. I can't confirm whether or not performance will jump in other games.

I already use all tweaks listed on this thread (patched wine version, Nvidia powerMixer set to high, CPU to High, taskset and so on...) but never successed to have better than medium quality playable...

I have tried enlightement and now I can play in high ! (with all other tweaks as I do not change my script...)

Before I used cinnamon and I think the big problem is compositing : I didn't find a way to disable compositing on cinnamon but enligthement have an option to disable it natively on fullscreen windows.

I know that kde have this option too, if someone that use kde can test this (disabling compositing for fullscrenn windows when playing SC2...) and give a feedback it can be a good info..

The difference between cinnamon and enligthement on SC2 performances is huge on my laptop and it's the only explanation i see...

If someone know how to disable compositing on cinnamon (on fullscreen windows...) I'm interested to give it a try...

PS : I am really happy to finally find a working solution because since that 2.X patches it was not a good play experience for me (lags...)

GLSL support for performance but with lighting bug by John Sun on Monday April 1st 2013, 1:08

hi everyone,

I'm using i7-3520M, kernel 3.8.4, Debian Sid, Mesa 8.0.5.

I found enabling GLSL support improves my fps, getting around 20 fps during late game with swarm hosts and lots of lings. Without GLSL support, it dropped under 10 and is nearly impossible to micro.

However, as dza mentioned before, GLSL support causes lights emitted from scv, tech labs and protoss building in constructions flicker in the whole screen.
bugged scvs looks like this:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsaEd-dTAlQ

RE: HotS crash random after a while by RB on Sunday March 17th 2013, 16:31

Thank you for the help but, there was no 1.5.24 on that ppa so I used 1.5.25 and 1.5.19 none of them helped.
I have an nvidia gtx 550.
The problem seems related to some audio issue. I don't know how to give other irfomation.
Regards

RE: HotS crash random after a while by Michael Grigoriev on Monday March 18th 2013, 0:54

Another possible lead:
Ran with a higher debug level, and saw a bunch of messages regarding GL being unable to allocate memory.
Set VideoMemorySize=1024 (even though my card has 2GB), and lowered texture quality to Max (not Ultra), and was able to play though several missions without crashing.

My computer set up isnt great but in windows I run high without a struggle. In wine I run low at 20fps tops. Quad core , 2.4gthz , 4g ram , ati 6870. I want to post some of my findings for anyone who cares to look into them.

1) My first install I got 20 fps(low settings). After I quit the program and ran again i was getting 10-12. At that time i was running 2xati5750 crossed over so i thought maybe linux , or wine wasnt using them both. So i put in my 6870 and still 10 fps.

2) I tried running in windowed mode to see if that would help with fps and to monitor task manager resources and priorities. It did help with my fps. Back up to 20. My windowed mode was about 1/3 of my full screen.

3) I noticed in my resources that my 4 cores never went above 60% , and my ram never hit 70%.

4) I also noted that in the priority tab , sc.exe was using more than 100% cpu. Strange i thought , since how can you use more then 100% of your cpu. So im thinking , maybe theres an error in programming there where the program thinks its using all the cpu but its not?

5) Another curious thing is that pulse audio priority was set to very high yet everything else was set to normal. Maybe we would get more performance out of tweaking sc.exe to very high? If only i knew how...Im sure one of you will figure it out.

6) Doing some searching on optimizing all of this , I found a comment in this thread about tweaking the registry. I dont remember it all but i typed it all out and tried it. Didnt make a whack of difference in my test environment.

There is an official thread about a performance mismanagement in WINE thats very apparent in starcraft2. Im not sure why this has been opened 3 years ago and last reply was 1 year ago with no progress made and its bug status is NEW?!?!?! So i left a reply there.

Also made notes while reading those threads and this one for possible solutions or workaround or anything that may improve performance. Like i said earlier ive tried shrinking the windowed mode down , tried changing drivers , even vid cards and some registry fix. Those all didnt do anything that ive noticed.

Well i just tried 2 more options. I read somewhere about variables.txt file an modding those values abit. Even watched a youtube video about it. Meh , still to no avail.

However , I also read somewhere to up the cpufreq from ondemand to performance. That helped. I was getting 20 fps max before on low setting and now im at 25 most of the time sometimes i hit 26. Doesnt sound like much but still is a 25% gain.

Anyhoo , I hope my research helps anyone , someone. Maybe earn you 5 fps gain or save you some time from researching dead ends.

I have not been able to get my in-game FPS above 30. Menus seem to be capped at 60 FPS, but when a single player campaign level is running it hovers around 15-20 FPS and never goes above 30. I have tried the various combinations of patches and environment settings as well as the old registry settings listed on this AppDB page. One or two actually decreased performance but none were able to improve it.

Given that my system isn't exactly outdated (yet) I should be able to crank it up well past 60 FPS, no? I'd really love to smooth it out before the expansion drops. Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

cpufreq was set to 'OnDemand'. I changed it to 'Performance', but it made no difference in the FPS. Watching my cores in htop while the game is active, they are not really being stressed. I also taskset'd the PID to use 1, 2, and auto cores; still no difference.

Vertical sync is off in SC2, but Sync to VBlank is on in nvidia-settings. I turned it off and restarted SC2 and the FPS was still capped at 60. The WM and compositor for Xfce 4.8 do not, to the best of my knowledge, do any OpenGL stuff at all.

This might begin to explain why the FPS is capped. To tell the truth, I don't care so much about that. As much as the Windows world pushes >60 FPS, my research tells me that >60 is unnecessary. Do you agree?

Thank you very much for sharing this idea. The biggest problem by far is the low FPS during the missions. 20 FPS just isn't going to cut it when playing Kerrigan :)

Well, the cap can be increased in variables.txt (set for example frameratecap=100 there). You won't notice any improvements though, unless you have a monitor that is actually capable of such FPS (forget about LCD), and even then you won't see any significant changes...

As for the low fps, please try the wine patch mentioned earlier in comment by christian on Sunday January 6th 2013, 6:45 (search it here), and let us know if it works.

Right now I'm running wine from the repo that incorporates that patch. I can switch back and forth between the patched wine and the stock wine and not see a difference in frames/sec. Shame, too, because I had high hopes for that patch after reading christian's comments :(

what driver version do you use? also, check if the commandline is correct (if i remember correctly, in some references there was a typo somewhere). this patch will only have effect with nvidia 313.x driver and correct commandline.

I have all tweaks (taskset, regedit, specific patched wine version with GL optimizations, dedicated X server, nice, few settings in Variables.txt and so on) and did not find the solution...
I can succeed to have correct FPS (50/60) on medium to low (medium with 3 param to low) but all 10 sec I have a huge lag that not allow me to play. On ladder, i'm seen all 10 sec as not available and players must wait for me...

I'm waiting HOTS (pre puchased since 2 month now) and it's this one that breaks all SC2 under Linux (I don't have windows so I do not have an easy solution).

I see that I'm not the only one to have performance issues recently. Several other people have posted here about getting low fps. Bottom line here is that I've got an i7 CPU, plenty of RAM, and a shiny new GTX670, and I'm still getting 20fps. Something is wrong.

Does this warrant a formal Wine bug report? If so, how can we get enough detail about the problem to make it useful (other than just "Starcraft 2 runs slow")?

I appreciate everyone that offered their two cents to help work around the problem. Thank you all very much.

Agreed with that but can't help (I don't know what is the best procedure).

FYI, I've managed to copy my SC2 install dir on a fresh ntfs partition to test under windows (windows has only 20 Go on my computer only to not remove it completely) and it's the same at a lesser level. I have lags under windows too... (but it's playable more easily).

I have completely reinstalled under Linux to see if it's my install and no : still unplayable...

Very annoying as I have just receive my sent confirmation for HOTS ...

Ps : looking on google, and there are a lots of windows users with the same problem but didn't find an applicable solution for Linux...

Hopes somebody will find a quick workaround (or patch)...

Tried to disable USB as there is a bug for MacOS X involving usb and disabling laptop_mode_tools in case of but nothing helps...

We aren't alone, there are windows users that complains too on battle net forums.

Anyway I found a solution working for me :
- apply regedit on top of this page (not sure if this is mandatory)
- taskset -p 2 `pidof SC2.exe`
- PRIMUS_libGLd=/usr/lib/nvidia-bumblebee/libGL.so.1 optirun nvidia-settings -a [gpu:0]/GPUPowerMizerMode=1 -c :8
- kill `pidof Agent.exe` (not sure if it's usefull but I added this as there is a download bug...)
- all processor set to performance
- wine 1.5.25 of wine 1.5.22 patched with NVIDIA optimizations (but now with HOTS applied it's the same...)

I can play online at medium without any problem (always little lags on vcs but a lot of windows users have so...)

I will try the exact same configuration this evening (but D3D keys are very important...)

Last tests I made, I had the same result with or without patch...

As I have dual core with multi threading (4 cores seen...), I use this :
tastset -p -c 0,2 `pìdof SC2.exe`. This force SC2 to use my 2 reals cores.
I think I have better result with this (try it if you have same kind of configuration)...

I get decent framerate (~120) on an idle screen but upon hovering over a unit, building, mineral, etc the frames drop to ~15 making the game all but unplayable. Has anyone else encountered a similar issue?

sc2 insists on being fullscreen by Kaito on Sunday February 24th 2013, 18:00

Hey,

After the last patch, sc2 seems to resize the desktop upon starting in fullscreen mode, even if I fiddle with the values in Variables.txt. Previously, it would run "fullscreen" inside the virtual desktop, and stay there, making it quite convenient to manage in a tiling window manager.

Running it in windowed mode draws some windows-y window decorations around the window inside the virtual desktop, which is annoying. Fullscreen (windowed) fails to correctly detect the virtual desktop size, and I end up with empty space on both sides of the game.

failed to run with optirun by Xu Yao on Monday February 18th 2013, 2:32

My laptop use optimus card ( i7 3612 + GT650m ).
When I run "wine Starcraft\ II.exe", it works, although it can only run s in the low qulity mode. However, when I use "optirun wine Starcraft\ II.exe", problem occurs.
When I press the "start" bottom on the welcome dialog, the program show me a dialog writes "An error occurs when starting Starcraft II, please try again" (actually, it's written in Chinese, I don't the exact words) instead of start the game and closed. Any one can help me?

So finally I could run the game. I use wine 1.5.23, and nothing else. No libraries.

If I dont use this command in terminal:
"echo 0|sudo tee /proc/sys/kernel/yama/ptrace_scope"
There is no chance to start the game. After I click on the play button on blizzard updater window, the game exits with this error message:

"Runtime Error!

Program: C:\Program Files\Star Craft II\Versions\Base23260\SC2.exe

R6034"...

If I use that command, the game maybe starts, and I could use everything in SC2, but sometimes crashes with the same error. Randomly.
Sometimes I can play for hours, sometimes the game crashes while loading the first ladder game. (But never crashes in the menu).

It is weird, though, that the patch alone decreased the performance by about the same amount as enabling THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS in vanilla wine, and enabling THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS on patched wine did not give any measurable performance gains. I did not perform extensive tests though... only watching few battles from a single replay with FPS display enabled, so I can't give any statistically relevant numbers.

Starter/Tuning/Benchmark Script by capilevastu on Monday August 20th 2012, 9:38

hi guys,

i once posted here my script but sadly got a disappointing response in terms of inspiration for further work or corrections - as if i am the only one, concerned about SC2 performance.
since than, i added quite some features notably a benchmark mode, because the last response before the post died asked me if i have any numbers about the tuning-settings.

the answer to this is still no, because i have not investigated the differences of the variety of settings yet.
first, i want to ask here again if there is anything to improve or alter.

sure, there are some things that must be changed but therefore, i need your advise.

one big disadvantage of this script is, it only starts SC2. but in order to get viable benchmark information, you need a reproducible workload, so:
- do you know how i can start replays out of the commandline? and
- how one might send commands form a bash shell to a x-window, like key-press "this" to switch to a player-camera or set the replay speed

- is "perf sched record" a good choice to collect performance data or do you know better ones?
e.g. i tried to collect directly from /proc/'pid'/[stats-sched-map] but i dont know about all that stuff. "perf" seems to me to be a better choice.

before you take a look at my pride, you should know that i am a scripting amateur.
i am happy about every suggestion.
pastebin.com/8TpjFJWD

i found the perfect solution to read the fps directly out of wine. the "fps" debug-channel.
i have limited my fps with "frameratecap"/"frameratecapGlue" in the Variables.txt to 40 and the "+fps"-output never exceeds it, which means, its a reliable output.

gives me all the information about fps, cpu- and gpu-load about SC2.
by now, i can finally start testing the differences between kernel parameters, settings in the Variables.txt and registry settings.
... if i knew how, i could even draw nice graphs about fps in correlation to cpu-/gpu-load :)
of course, i will post the future results here.

i have also changed the script again slightly. now, it can remove listed kernel-modules and adds them back afterwards
here is the script:
pastebin.com/PEKRBnDA

got the first results now. nothing out of the ordinary, the interesting stuff will follow soon.
i have to admit, that there are some disadvantages about my way of benchmarking.
i never tested several settings, always one at once, so i cant say anything about correlations between them.
and these results are of course only representative for my machine/configuration.

the benchmark-process:
i restart the laptop before every run and dont start anything except of the sc2-benchmark.
while the benchmark, the script starts a certain replay 5 times and collects once every second the fps, cpu-, gpu- and memory-usage while the replay is running.
after about 50 minutes of replay, the script closes sc2 and calculates the average results out of the benchmark-data.
one could do more with the raw data but my main focus is on average fps.
in my point of view, the benchmark-cycle has to take about 50 minutes in order to eliminate noise from the data - to get more viable results.

results:

in this first run, i only changed registry settings. the start configuration was:
"AlwaysOffscreen"="disabled"
"DirectDrawRenderer"="opengl"
"Multisampling"="disabled"
"OffscreenRenderingMode"="fbo"
"RenderTargetLockMode"="auto"
"StrictDrawOrdering"="disabled"
"UseGLSL"="disabled"

and brought the following result:
Average FPS: 10.8659159433
Average CPU %: 114.0558922558
Average Memory %: 43.9415151514
Average GPU %: 37.9754208754

i only changed one setting at a time and switched back to start-configuration after the benchmarking.
here is what i got: (performance > quality)

dont ask me plz why the cpu-averge is above 100% (maybe because of my 2 cpu-cores). if you want to know how these numbers where generated, take a look at my script:
pastebin.com/qScXr3Pv(some minor changes to previous versions)

the next things on my list to test are:
- process attributes: renice, taskset, chrt, ionice
- kernel-parameters: ... take a look in the script to see the full list and its values.
and finally
- the vast possibilities of the Variables.txt but only some selected options.

will take some time though. be patient, ill post the results here.
im still happy about any commentary about all this.

im experimenting with the setting and performance of sc2 quite a while now and i wanted to share my experiences with you, hopefully someone can add or change some thing.

the first and most important performance tweak consists the Variables.txt. there are some commands that increase performance like nothing else.

these two options make the shadows completely disappear

GraphicsOptionShadowQuality=1
shadows=0

the sound seems to me to be an important bottleneck of wine, heres my sound block of the varaibles
notice, the 6 soundchannels ive set, mute the individual sounds alot, especially in big fights, you only hear some, which is ok to me.

this shall only be a little cleavage of my varaibles, there are some more possibilities in this but the information about it are very rare.
i dont have to mention that ive disabled/lowered every other option thats there and that you have to write-protect the Variables.txt in order to keep some of the settings. if you want to see my full variables, see:
pastebin.com/Lvs2Lmph

the second thing you can enhance is wine.

this is how i compile my wine. right now im still experimenting with it because i cant get the -march=native flag to work (which is really sad), maybe you guys can help me with it.
it would be amazing if i get some pro-tips about compiler optimization, because this is an area i dont know very good.

the third thing you can optimize is the execution of sc2.
ive written a starter script, that automatizes a couple of steps. see the script-comments for further information.
to see a clean version, see:
pastebin.com/09CNrxj2